FRACTURE

Director: Gregory Hoblit (Primal Fear, Frequency, Fallen)
Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Gosling

It's that slow time of year for the motion picture industry (relatively speaking, of course). The long runs of the Oscar pics and the winter-time dramas has ended. The summer blockbuster season is coming up. So what does Hollywood release this time of year? Oh they'll pepper in a few unusual films that while quite good, weren't anywhere near Oscar-quality (The Hoax), and a few other quirky films they don't really know where to put (Hot Fuzz). Mostly though, the springtime is the time for straight genre films. It's a time to reset your cinematic seasonal clock from the intense films of the winter with movies you don't have to think very hard about while you watch. It's the time for teenage slasher films (Disturbia, Vacancy), silly comedies (Blades of Glory, Wild Hogs), and Hollywood thrillers or courtroom dramas. Guess which movie happens to fit into both of those last categories?

So, Fracture, it's a straight Hollywood courtroom drama/thriller. It's 2007's Primal Fear, or Runaway Jury, or Murder in the First, or maybe even A Time to Kill. They're all the same basic movie. They're all enjoyable enough films. It's true I've already forgotten most of the "plot" of Fracture, but at the same time I have to admit I thoroughly enjoyed myself for the two hours I was watching it. This movie is like wearing your comfy old blue jeans. No one's going to compliment you on your outfit, but it's comfortable and easy, and sometimes there's just no need to dress up at all. Really though, if you think about it, those holes in the knees make you look pretty tacky.

Our particular plot for this version of the courtroom thriller follows Anthony Hopkins as he first kills his wife, confesses to it, and then spends the rest of the film toying with a young prosecutor (Gosling), who is under the wrong impression that the confession makes this an open-and-shut case. There are obligatory revelations and twists as the trial goes on. Hopkins, of course, is always quite good as the bad guy, much smarter than you or I (see Hannibal Lector). Gosling is fresh off his excellent Half Nelson performance, but here his performance is much more in the realm of "fine" or maybe "acceptable". There's nothing really wrong with anything in this film, except for its general laziness. There's nothing exceptional either. It's all been done a thousand times before. The characters, the plot, the structure, the script, the direction. It's all the same. It's a well-worn, but comfortable enough, little film. There are plot-holes, and dumb dialog, and characters behaving or speaking only as movie characters behave or speak. But we've seen it before, and we've enjoyed it before.

Standouts: Nothing, I repeat, nothing stands out.
Blowouts: It's at that normal level of Hollywood dumb. Also, I'm pretty sure the film's understanding of law and the legal system is quite a bit off, but since it's just a silly movie we're talking about I guess that's tolerable.

Grade: B-

THE HOAX

Director: Lasse Hallstrom (What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Chocalate, The Shipping News)
Starring: Richard Gere, Alfred Molina, Marcia Gay Harden, Hope Davis

The plot of the Hoax is a fairy thin story. That's why it's such a surprise that the film still manages to entertain throughout. It's not a long movie (115 minutes), but even with the short running time it doesn't feel as if much really happened. Director Lass Hallstrom is the main reason that it worked. He does a very fine job of stretching the material to fill the voids, so to speak, but the very good performances by Richard Gere and Alfred Molina should also be noted.

The Hoax is "based" (I love that term) on the real fraud that bestselling author Clifford Irving perpetrated on the publishing industry in the 1970s, where he claimed to have gotten exclusive access to the troubled, reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes to pen an autobiography. Hughes had virtually isolated himself from the world, using only a handful of middlemen to conduct his affairs of business. Irving, along with his writing partner Dick Susskind, assumed that this isolation would be what allowed their scheme to work, that Hughes would never come out of his self-imposed exile to denounce them as frauds. In the end, he did (at least by telephone - his last interview), and they did prison time.

In the film, Irving (Gere) and Susskind (Molina) are talented, but unsuccessful authors. Irving's latest novel is derided as a cheap Phillip Roth-knockoff and rejected for publication. He's desperate for cash, but wonderfully he's even more desperate for noteriety. This is what I most liked about the film, that it got this bit right on why this man took all these risks. The money is just part of the equation that makes the defrauder into a big man, a success. He's terrified of his own potential for failure, so he'll do whatever it takes to be a success. I think another recent film about a fraud, Catch Me If You Can, missed on this point. I think that Spielberg probably made a slightly better movie than The Hoax, but there's a bit less truth to it.

Anyway, back to the movie. Once the authors devise their plan, they study Hughes handwriting and make forgeries of letters for their publishers. These somehow pass the muster of handwriting analysis, and they get a huge upfront sum for the book, although most of the funds are directed to Hughes. Their solution to this problem is to have the check made out to H. Hughes, and have Irving's wife open a Swiss bank account as Helga Hughes. From the first moment that the authors create their scheme, there are many skeptics. Wonderfully there are also characters more than willing to take them at their word, as they see big sales for the book, and the potential for their own noteriety, but there are characters who doubt the validity of the autobiography. Each time a skeptic raises their head, Gere and Molina concoct a plan to squash their doubts, and the stakes of their fraud feel ratcheted up. Eventually, the hoax becomes interconnected with the Watergate scandal and the collapse of Nixon's presidency, or so Irving thinks. There is certainly some blurring of reality as the lies stack higher and higher.

As I said Lass Hallstrom deserves much of the credit for this film's success. His sense of pacing is excellent, with comedy, or despair peppered in at just the right moments to continue pulling the story along. In the end, just like the real hoax of Clifford Irving, Gere goes to jail. It's an interesting ride to that point, though. It may feel short, or thin, as a story, and I don't know how much there really is for the viewer to take away from this film, but I think it's definitely worth the 2-hour diversion from the rest of your life.

Standouts: A "well-crafted" film all around by Hallstrom, et al. Fine acting across the board.
Blowouts: The story didn't reach very high, but it defintely grabbed whatever it was reaching for.

Grade: B

FLANNEL PAJAMAS

Director: Jeff Lipsky (1st major release)
Starring: Justin Kirk, Julianne Nicholson

Flannel Pajamas is a wise little movie, and a good one, although I imagine it will be relegated to the "soon forgotten" bin in short order. I think I can best describe it as "a fine little independent picture", but unfortunately there's nothing to distinguish it from the 50 other fine pictures released each year.

The movie, almost unfortunately set in New York, tells the story of a failed relationship, jumping from what it thinks is one key moment to the next along the arc of emotional rise and fall. It's a travelogue of a failed marital trip, if you will. One is a talky (supposedly) Jewish salesman of sorts, in the business of Broadway. The other a shy, freckled Catholic girl from Montana. We have the first date, where we find out the 2 people are emotional scarred and needy, but that they are good people nonetheless. We get some terrifically objective sex scenes, which soon enough fade from the screen (and we assume from their relationship). There's the sweet little marriage ceremony where positive vibes abound. Then there's slowly building (and perhaps even slightly creepy) distrust, confusion, and eventually repulsion. Kids are wanted, but never arrive. The man hates her friends and family. The girl hates his closest friend, his brother. And in short order, they split up, wondering what went wrong.

Well, as the mother of the girl tells us, it's no great secret why some marriages fail. Although given the number of failures, I tend to think it's more of a secret than we want to admit. This movie touches on how selfishness that is near the center of failure in a relationship, but the film's main argument is that it all comes down to the basics, and I think it's generally right. The boy is a saver, the girl a financial spender (of his bank account). He's also acidic and sarcastic, with a fair dose of passive-aggresiveness in his character. It's unspoken, at least until the mother shows a surprising streak of anti-semitism late in the film and speaks it (and much more), but the boy as written is a bit of the American Jewish stereotype.

But so is the girl, a stereotype that is, not Jewish. She is extremely needy, more than willing to take the money of her man. When things don't go her way she'll gladly complain and nag. They're imperfect individuals both, but not a shred more than the rest of us, I don't think. They're good people, but flawed. They're definitely not right for each other, but realize that they don't have much else in the world except each other. Some few of us are lucky enough to be dealt a great hand from the start, some others have nothing from the get-go and are destined to lose, but most people's cards are somewhere in between. That's where these people live. They hoped their hand was better than it was. And then they lost their bet.

Standouts: A solid enough script, with solid enough acting, in a solid enough movie.
Blowouts: It was 'good' throughout, but at no point did was it better than that.

Grade: B-

ZODIAC

Director: David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en, Alien 3)
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr

Zodiac follows the investigation of the Zodiac killer murders in San Francisco in the 1960s and 70s and it is an undeniably deft bit of filmaking. In form it is basically a simple police procedural (or perhaps an investigative procedural as some of its major characters are newspapermen rather than cops). Maybe a better description would be to note how similar it is to All the President's Men, as layer after layer of evidence and clues are unearthed and the tension ratcheted up as they get nearer and nearer the killer. It is a long, and often fairly slow film, but I enjoyed nearly every minute of it. Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr, and Mark Ruffalo were excellent throughout.

I think it likely that one of the main complaints some viewers might have with this film is the lack of a standard "payoff". Not to ruin it for you, but there is no thrilling climax here. In standard movie terms there's not even a resolution. For my money though, I found that this worked better than if there were either. The search for the Zodiac killer was far more interesting than any silly tacked on action sequence could have been, or even some neatly packaged resolution. The point of the film is the search, the investigation. I will go so far as to say that what I found most disappointing in the film was that it attempted to show an individual as the killer rather than leave us hanging. In reality no one knows who the Zodiac killer is (except perhaps the killer himself if he's not dead). There may be a likely culprit, perhaps even a very likely culprit, but I think the key bit is that it is unresolved. We don't know. We'll never know.

Regardless, as I said the film focuses on the events themselves and the (nearly neverending) search for the killer, not any final discovery. The first half of the movie mostly follows the police (Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards) and a newspaperman (Downey, Jr) as the murders occur, panic strikes the city, and the police search out the killer. At about the half-way point, while the police investigation winds down from lack of evidence, Jake Gyllenhaal almost personally takes over the search. He is a young cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle, only tangentially related to the events in any way, but nearly obsessed with finding the killer. There are many dead ends in the search for clues, but that's part of the excitement. It't like working out a puzzle. If you're into puzzles, I'll bet you'll like Zodiac. If not, maybe not so much.

For my money, the real joy of this film is in the details, though. It's in the relationship of the Zodiac events with Dirty Harry, that came out while the investigation was ongoing. It's with the strange turns the case takes as the Zodiac killer strives to be noticed in the press and on television. It's with the calm, almost nerdy, demeaner of the cops looking for the killer, and how they became celebrities themselves. How they had accusations thrown at them that they planted Zodiac letters for the noteriety it would bring them. Or even the fact that a editorial cartoonist took up the case. All these things really did happen, and are certainly interesting in their own right, but they're even more interesting on screen I think. This is a fine movie, perhaps my favorite Fincher film even (although most of the Fight Club fans will disagree I suspect).

Standouts: A well-made movie all around. Fincher and the actors are all quite good.
Blowouts: Nothing really failed.

Grade: A-